The present disclosure relates to resource management and configuration in a wireless digital network. In particular, the present disclosure relates to management and configuration of network devices located in remote network nodes.
Wireless digital networks, such as networks operating under Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standards, are spreading in their popularity and availability. With such popularity, however, come problems of resource management and configurations. Specifically, in many network settings, network devices in one or more remote offices need to communicate with network devices in a central corporate office. Typically, management and configuration of network devices in remote offices are handled by administrators located in the remote offices. Such configuration of network devices in remote offices normally requires entering a number of commands on the remote network devices and establishing communication links to the corporate network at the central corporate office. Therefore, such remote network device management and configuration process is prone to errors from, e.g., human inputs.
Moreover, the management and configuration process will likely require an administrator to be present physically in the remote offices. In addition to the requirement for the administrator to be present in the remote office, it usually requires another administrator in the central corporate office to configure the corresponding network devices in the central corporate office in order to communicate to the remote network devices at the remote offices. The management and configuration process by the administrator at the central corporate office typically involves manually allocating a pool of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that will be assigned to the remote network devices in remote offices. These addresses typically need to be reserved for the remote network devices in the remote offices. Furthermore, configuration information of the remote network devices is often stored with the network devices in the central corporate office, and usually needs to be backed up regularly and copied a remote backup location, such that the configuration information can be successfully recovered in the event that a remote network device fails and needs to be replaced and/or reconfigured. Thus, existing remote network management and configuration process requires a lot of human as well as network resources.